SA slammed for registration law
Children born to foreign parents ‘being discriminated against’
THE UN Committee of the Rights of the Child has castigated South Africa for not changing its Birth and Death Registration Act which discriminates against children born in this country to foreign parents.
It said the law is “problematic” because it had a “punitive or discriminatory impact on certain groups of children”.
This after the Human Rights Commission said it would review the current legislation and its impact on children born in SA of foreign parents.
The committee wants the government to review and amend all legislation and regulations “relevant to birth registration and nationality and remove discriminatory requirements.”
As a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, SA is bound to it by international law. SA is also a member of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child.
Lawyers for Human Rights has also weighed in on the matter, saying it has been inundated with cases of children who do not have unabridged birth certificates.
“Birth registration is the most important document, an element in ensuring that people do not become stateless. Some categories of children are entirely and expressly excluded from birth registration through the Births and Deaths Registration Act (BDRA),” said Liesl Muller from Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR).
Muller, who heads the LHR’s Statelessness Unit, Refugee and Migrant Rights Programme, said just last week she interviewed “about 70 undocumented children who were not going to school in Aliwal North. The list goes on!”
The Act is “problematic”, Muller said, as it “confirms that the notice of birth is the registration of the birth.
If a child has at least one South African parent, married or not, mother or father, the child is South African and will receive a birth certificate with an ID number which is printed, computerised.
“But if both parents are foreign, the child is probably foreign and will be issued with a handwritten birth certificate without an ID number,” she said.
Dr Jaap van der Straaten, chief executive at Civil Registration Centre for Development-CRC4D in The Hague, Netherlands, said the Department of Home Affairs appeared to misunderstand the basics of the right of the child and what birth registration and birth certification mean.
Van der Straaten said three of his children had been born in southeast Asian countries and these countries had registered their births and issued birth certificates and “thanks to that” they have Dutch nationality.
The departments of Home Affairs and Justice and Constitutional Development were contacted for comment but they had not responded by the time of going to print.